Comparison of Geometrical and Physical Optics for Cross-Polarisation Prediction in Reflector Antennas

Abstract

Geometrical Optics (GO) and Physical Optics (PO) have been popular methods to analyse reflector antennas. Although both techniques have extensively been used in the literature and are shown to produce overall accurate results, they lead to some differences in the obtained results. Earlier works have focused on the differences in the sidelobe estimation obtained by GO and PO. The present work presents a comparison of both methods in terms of cross-polarised fields prediction. The study includes both front-fed and offset configurations, using both linearly and circularly polarised feeds and exploits in-house GO and PO tools as well as commercial PO software.